Carrie

Carrie’s brutal exploration of The Destructive Impact of Othering is based on the bullying King witnessed as a student. As he wrote the story’s first pages, he was inspired by a girl named Dodie Franklin who had attended elementary and high school with him and later died by suicide as an adult. Dodie experienced relentless bullying because she was from a poor family that was considered strange. Much of the other students’ criticism targeted her clothing because she wore the same “ancient sleeveless blouse” and “dowdy old black skirt” to school every day. (King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft, p. 80). One day during her sophomore year of high school, she returned from Christmas vacation with a new, fashionable outfit. However, she was devastated when the mockery only became worse: “Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in; she was punished for even trying to break free” (King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft, p. 81). Similarly, Carrie briefly feels included when she wears her new dress at her high school prom, but Chris and Billy’s cruel prank with the pig’s blood reminds everyone of her outcast status and ushers in the novel’s deadly climax. As the first novel King ever published, Carrie holds a vital place in his body of work, and the inspiration he took from actual instances of bullying lends emotional and psychological weight to the novel’s focus on a young woman’s social ostracization.